I haven’t been able to do any work on the Hen House recently. The grass in our paddocks got up to knee height, so we asked a neighbor if he wanted to put his cows in the paddocks to get the grass down.
It turns out year old calves are very curious and with around 20 in our paddock at the moment, they like to sneak up on you from behind and surround you.
On the plus side, the grass is now to a more manageable height and the cows will be moving out before next weekend.
Yesterday I had the fortunate experience of reminding myself why I don’t like digging holes.
The Hen House is held off the ground on six 100×100 (4″x4″) treated posts concreted into the ground. The posts are only sunk 600mm (24 inches) into the ground, but digging is definitely not my forte, and ten plus years of desk rot sitting at a keyboard doesn’t seem to help one bit.
Photographic Evidence...
Either way, I managed to get the holes dug and the posts concreted in place.
After a LOT of investigation of the La Crosse TX20, I’ve managed to fully decode the complete datagram from the La Crosse TX20 INCLUDING the Checksum.
The La Crosse TX20
Here’s everything you’ll ever want to know about the pin out and the communications protocol of the La Crosse TX20.
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I’ve been wanting to build a weather station, complete with the Geiger counter I’ve been working on. Building the wind speed and direction sensor seemed like a daunting task, especially since they need to be weather tight, but have moving components in them.
Since it’s nearly impossible to acquire an AAG or Dallas 1-wire Anemometer I decided to purchase a TX20 Wind Anemometer and use an AVR to decode the interface from it and reformat to a protocol more suitable for me.
The La Crosse TX20
I’ve managed to find some very useful information on a Violet Ray design through the Google Patents website. The patent number is 1506344. The link to the patent is http://www.google.com/patents?q=1506344. This patent isn’t for the model I’m trying to repair, but it gives some very useful information.
This includes a basic electrical circuit and theory of operation.
It also confirms my suspicions that the yellow cylinder covering the primary coil is likely to be the capacitor (Condenser). I suspected it as this yellow component didn’t appear to contain a winding coil and appears to be permanently connected in series with the primary coil to the AC power in.
I'm pretty confident the yellow part is a condenser.
I hope to test the individual components this weekend and should be able to deduce what’s wrong with it.
With the lower cover removed, it becomes clear that the internals of this Violet wand are very similar to the Master brand unit. This should make it a lot easier to find problems than blind investigation.
The intensity knob is mechanically linked to an electrode which contacts with an armature. I believe the armature oscillates electromagnetically due to making and breaking the circuit as the primary coil is energized.
A closer look at the primary coil and switching components
I believe the big outer yellow cylinder may be a capacitor, but not 100% sure as of yet.
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The first step to any repair is getting into the guts of the device…. primarily without damaging it.
There is very little information on the web about the internals of these devices. It looks very similar to the Violet Wand made by the Master company, so I got hold of some diagrams from patents and took it from there.
All of the information on the internals I could find, was available at http://www.electrotherapymuseum.com/Articles/VioletRayConstruction.htm
The wand could be unscrewed in the middle, but the parts couldn’t be separated. Something was stopping it from coming apart.
The Violet Wand has two small indents near the intensity adjuster.
The two small indentations
I was hoping that there were screws in “dem dere indents”. I carefully scraped at the indents and found that they were in fact some sort of wax.
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I’ve been asked to take a look at a non-functioning Violet Wand in the hope that I can repair it back to working order.
The Violet Wand I've been asked to repair
These devices have many uses from being used as Quack Medical devices, through to being used in bondage and other extreme activities – The ones used for the extreme activities are typically higher powered devices though. And anyway, who am I to question, when I’ve been asked to take a look at something that uses high voltages and resonant transformer circuits (Tesla anyone?).
The first step will be trying to get the device open without damaging it.
Stay Tuned…
